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Sessions & Content

Data warehouse designers often ignore the specific needs of an OLAP database. In this session, John will outline the best ways to optimise your relational database to support your multidimensional OLAP cubes

In this humorous session I’ll be contesting many of the so called "best practices" in SQL Server and demonstrating counter arguments. Come along to see how so called "pillars" of design are starting to break down.

This session will discuss the recommended approaches and best practices for partitioning and scaling Windows Azure SQL Database, allowing you to fully leverage the managed relational database service and take advantage of massive scale-out scenarios.

Processing of SSAS OLAP databases can be a tricky business, particularly when it comes to incremental processing of dimensions. John will give you real life examples of why certain approaches work and others do not.

“Just use partitioning” is the answer you hear, when you need to manage very large data sets in your Data Warehouse. But how do you design and implement it? We will walk through different ways to design partitioning, including layered partitioning.

In this session, we are going to explain and test different DW features in SQL Server 2012, including star join optimization through bitmap filters, table partitioning, window functions, columnstore indices and more.

Sometimes some piece of T-SQL slips by, or falls out of memory.Come and revisit old favorites, and brush up on new T-SQL features and enhancements.This session is chock full of code examples, including before-and-after demos and how-to illustrations.

The technique of Recency Frequency Intensity/Monetary is a powerful analytical technique for identifying data patterns as well as business performance. An introduction to the technique will be given, however the main focus of the session will be on demonstrating on how RFI/M can be performed using a number of SQL features such as Data Windowing, the OVER clause and PARTITION BY, CROSS APPLY and Common Table Expressions and how you can nest the table expressions. The session should be of benefit to both inexperienced and experienced SQL coders and analysts, each construct will be explained as well as the query plans produced. Demo's will be done on AdventureWorks which we actually discover is going out of business!

SQL Azure is Microsoft’s new strategy for storing your data in the cloud, but what to do when you exceed the 10/50GB limit. This is where sharding or partitioning comes into play – this session shows you how it can be done in an OLTP system and show you some of the common pitfalls of SQL azure as we have discoverd in analyzing SQL Azure as an alternative to onsite SQL Server instances at different clients.